"Pitcairn said you would come," the duke answered her blandly, taking out his watch and looking at it with a smile. "He said you would come before you went to the Duchess of Gordon's rout. He even named the exact time within a quarter of an hour."
"Mr. Pitcairn is a very wonderful man," Nancy returned.
"He's a poor hand at description," responded the duke, with a heat of admiration for her in his tone.
"It depends somewhat," said Nancy, "upon what he has the describing of." And in this speech the way women know how to belittle an enemy is clearly to be seen. "He can describe a barn to a farmer, a road to a surveyor, or a church to an architect, so that they fall into an ecstasy of admiration of his parts. When it comes to a woman it's a different matter. Mr. Pitcairn doesn't know a woman. He's not, rightly speaking, a man. As Mr. Carmichael says, 'He's just a head.'"
"It's a curious head," the duke answers, "a curious head and a very clear one."
"A clear head to prosecute; never to defend," Nancy responded; "which leads me to the cause of my visit. I have come to ask for the pardon of Timothy Lapraik."
The duke dropped his eyelids, and a strange light shone from under them.
"You compliment me, Mistress Stair, in thinking I have the power to undo that which was settled by the law of your country and a jury tried and true. I took no part in the affair; the prosecution was not mine; in a word, the thing is perhaps beyond my power, had I the desire to get him a pardon, which, however, I have not."
All this time neither had made any motion toward sitting down, but stood regarding each other, alert and watchful. It was Nancy Stair who took the first move. Coming over to the duke she put one of her hands on his breast and stood looking up at him out of those gray eyes of whose power she was not unconscious.
"My lord," she said, "I, who have had the handling of people much of my life, have learned to recognize power when I see it, and I see it in you. There's just naught you can't do that you set your mind to."